Spotlight Article:

The Unexpected Energy Benefits of Mechanically Vented Crawl Spaces

The debate on how best to treat crawl spaces has gone on for decades, and the building codes regulating crawl space design have constantly evolved. For a long time the entrenched thinking was to rely ...

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June 09, 2015

The debate on how best to treat crawl spaces has gone on for decades, and the building codes regulating crawl space design have constantly evolved. For a long time the entrenched thinking was to rely ... [continue reading]

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June 06, 2015

Two recent Passive House (PH) consultations of mine have made clear the difficulty of making the PH standard more widely adopted in this country. Both consultations were for small, single-family homes. Neither house was more &... [continue reading]

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May 13, 2015

It’s a paradox in residential construction: Developers clear a wooded lot to create housing, and one of the first things the new owners do is buy small trees to plant on the property.
... [continue reading]

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February 15, 2015

Building codes have really motivated builders to increase the energy efficiency of new homes in recent years. But as quickly as the codes are changing, new products are coming to the market even faster. Sometimes ... [continue reading]

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January 31, 2015

The average home in the United States makes at least 2,000 annual demands for hot water. And that’s very conservative. A more-likely demand value exceeds 4,000. Couple those demands with an average wait time for ... [continue reading]